I’m having a strange problem. I have many movies that have parts. I have followed the suggested naming convention. On my smart TV and on my laptop it works fine… however on Android, it will either skip the first part and play the second part, but more often play the first part and go back to the home screen and not play the second part… any ideas?
just to experiment, I renamed the 2 parts as 2 different movies, and Android plays them fine, so it is clearly capable of playing either file.
I have followed many suggestions from the forums for similar issues, and none have made any difference. I then checked the files’ bit rate, resolution etc… and yes they do not match precisely, but the TV and the laptop still play them seamlessly as parts, regardless.
Not all Plex clients can deal with “stacked files” (1 movie spread across multiple files).
I found the most reliable way to deal with that is to simply merge the files (e.g. using MKVToolNix). That’ll get rid of any naming hiccups or players that don’t support it.
Does MKVToolNix re-encode the parts into one file? As that wont work for me, it will take 1000 years to do it all.
However, I remember an app, years ago, but forgotten the name, that joined two mp4 files into 1 and did it in seconds. Basically it creates a single mp4 file that you rename to the movie name, and then that file references the 2 parts that you have, so you need to have those files on your hard drive somewhere.
Anyone know that app and what it is called? I did a google search using as many search terms I could think of and can’t find it.
MKVToolnix remuxes the files… no re-encoding or transcoding involved. Basically it’ll copy the 2 source files in a single target file.
Only prerequisite is that the files have matching streams (in type and sequence).
Hi,
Thank you so much for your help, but 1 last question, as I dont really understand your answer.
What is type and sequence? I’m guessing type would be x264, but I dont know what you mean for sure by that or by sequence.
And how long does that process take, ball park? I know it would vary on the file, but for a 2hr movie at 1080p would it be literally seconds to remux or some minutes, many minutes or an hour, or more?
Each file contains a number of streams… mostly there’s 1 video stream, 1 or more audio streams and sometimes a number of subtitles.
Appending files only properly works if the two files have the same streams – e.g. same type of stream (video/audio/subtitle), same codecs for each matching stream and the same sequence.
Example:
Stream
File 1
File 2
File 3
1
video (h264)
video (h264)
video (h264)
2
audio (AC3, eng)
audio (AC3, eng)
audio (AC3, eng)
3
audio (AC3, fra)
audio (AC3, fra)
audio (AC3, ger)
4
audio (AC3, nld)
audio (AC3, nld)
subtitle (SRT, eng)
5
subtitle (SRT, eng)
subtitle (SRT, eng)
subtitle (SRT, ger)
You’ll be able to stitch files 1 + 2 together as their streams match (same types of streams, same codecs and same sequence). You will however not be able to append the 3rd file as it has different streams (e.g. no French audio, no Dutch audio but instead a German AC3 audio; also the subtitles don’t match).
To be fair… that’s also a requirement for stacked files within Plex (some of the listed prerequisites for stacked files are that there’s no more than 8 files and they must have matching streams).
–
As for how long it takes… usually a few seconds; if you have a slow HDD it might take a minute or two.
Thanks, I followed that guide and getting the following error:
__
Errors emitted by job ‘Multiplexing to file “Spiti2002.mkv” in directory “C:\Movie Library\1”’ started on 2020-06-12 19:51:40 +01:00 —
Files cannot be appended to themselves. The argument for ‘–append-to’ was invalid.
__
I read on the posts that others have had that error and no one seems to know what it is. Any Ideas?
Check the destination file name. It cannot be the same as one of the source files if in the same directory.
You may need to rename the destination file name, ex: Spiti2002-1.mkv, or change the destination path.
The destination path should be out of the view of Plex Media Server. You don’t want PMS trying to scan the file while MakeMKV is still writing it to the directory.
After the files are combined, put the output file in an “Other Videos” library and make sure it plays OK, especially over the joining point. Using an Other Videos library keeps Plex from trying to match, download metadata, etc.
If it plays OK you can then move it into the desired movie library and let Plex do the normal scanning, metadata download, etc.
As for the naming, I tried a bunch of options and made sure it wasnt named the same in any way, but it was going into a folder that PMS would scan, so maybe that was the problem. I’ll try saving to a different folder outside of PMS. Thanks.
I ran a quick test and was able to combine two videos. MakeMKV v47.0.0 on Win10 Pro.
FYI, you no longer have to right click on the first file. You can just drag the second file into the “Source files” area and choose “Append to…” from the pop up window.
I’m not actually merging 2 parts of the same movie. I have my own clip that is 11 seconds long that I want at the beginning of each movie. but my 11 second clip has no sound track. so, i’m going to add a silent sound track using the same audio codec and that should hopefully resolve this issue.
Yeah, I have a clip for that and it works well, but the one I’m using here is a unique clip for each movie. So that won’t work.
I have added a sound track to part 1 and encoded as a new mp4 file and this time MKVTOOLNIX did work, however the new mkv file doesn’t work. There are just too many variables it would seem, to align these 2 files. And would simply take too long on 1000+ movies to figure out.
However, I have solved my problem. As I said, it works as 2 parts on my laptop and my smart TV despite the 2 files not matching in any way, even that part 1 has no sound track, even if the resolutions are different, it works…
We know it doesn’t work on Android, but I decided to cast it to my Chromecast… it works! So in the trash goes that stupid android box and I’ll plug my Chromecast into the projector instead and cast the movie from my laptop.
Wish I didnt bother spending the £3.99 for Plex on Android now. Oh well.
Regardless, thank you for all your help. Greatly appreciated!!
I’m running the Android app on a Nvidia Shield and found a fix that someone else suggested on another forum. In the advanced settings of your android app, disable the setting that says “enable new video player”. After I did that, multipart movies started playing correctly.
People have suggested using MKVToolNix to combine multipart movies together, but that isn’t a good idea with 4K movies with HDR metadata because your display won’t get the correct metadata once you start playing the content from the second disc.
